Tuesday, March 1, 2011

[I was unable to chase away noted Satanic carrion fowl "Ravenzomg", so instead I forced it to write a review. -Ed.]

Tooltip: The Greeks long suspected this, but it wasn't until April 12th of 1882 that Ferdinand von Lindemann conclusively proved it when he constructed himself the most awesome birthday party possible and nobody showed up.

Good morning my precious pets! This is Ravenzomg-58 with your latest fix of magnificent Randallian secretion!

First, look at the posture of this faceless Void-Creature. Despite being expressionless and utterly featureless beyond his accessories-du-jour [as my Viking ancestors said], we can tell the dejected and completely vacuous hole that is formed within his soul! This creature, my friends, is crushed not by great mass [as would have occurred were our own Robyn to attend the Geometer's party], but by the great emptiness that is his friendless existence!

Now before you rush to the "GOOMH, Randall, I too am a friendless machination!" that I know you frail-but-well-read creatures must be thinking, let us continue on this journey into Randall's tangible brilliance!

Look at the off-centre* stickman, and the white Void left in the Creature's absence --- not only does Randall tell us of the Creature's loneliness ["tell"] he also demonstrates [or "shows"] it to us; he both shows AND tells! Brilliant. Just brilliant.

Now then, before you rate this a 9/10 for brilliant-but-lacking-secret-codes, beware you foolish children! For secret codes do prance amongst the Great Randall's words like fauns in the forest, waiting to surprise you at a moment's notice with a joyous reunion between the dreamer and the dream!

Unlike the common avian specimen, your delightfully brilliant Raven[zomg!] had noticed a trick in Randall's otherwise functionally florid prose. There were altogether too many Es in this note, which I recognized as statistically too many even [for Mathematics are also among my trades, besides Language, Sarcasm, and that other thing] for that luscious letter which we use with relish every time we mention our beloved Void-Creatures.

So, having discovered this quirk, the message was dissasembled, the letters scattered and reörganized into their proper meaning, the musings of our Genius Man-God!

Behold, my children, the wisdom and questing queries of the troubled wise man we have come to worship at our alters!

Is damp disco still free, my Lord? Only those who have left this existence truly know; only they will know.

I laughed, but it was definitely a 'That's really sad, in a self-aware and still really pathetic way' laugh, and not a 'HAHAHA GOOMH RANDALL SO FUNNY I TRY TO MANUFACTURE FRIENDS OUT OF MATH, TOO!' way.

@Neal: For some reason it comes out really sarcastic, but my praise in the first half of the review was nearly 100% genuine -- using a low-detail medium Randall really managed to express the loneliness of his Void-Creature through posturing and negative space. Ignoring the bizarre Randall-syntax tooltip ["[...]he constructed himself the most awesome birthday party"], this comic is actually pretty good. But anagrams are fun, and except for "Rare-coat" it produced some okay phrases.

The saddest part is that the real reason Randall can't make friends with a compass and a straightedge is because these people are too good for him. They have actual geometric forms and straight lines for bodies, and not shoddy squiggly hand-drawn lines and unfinished ovals. Thus, they abandon Randall in disgust.

Yes, Randall. Birds are dinosaurs. We knew that for years already. I can trace that fact as back as Beakman's World, and that show stopped airing in 1997. That's at least 14 years you're late, Randall. AT LEAST.

And that's just for the tooltip. The comic is an exchange of douchebaggery between Megan and Blonde-Megan. Does that make it a funny comic? No. Not at all.

Now, if I were Rob I'd start concocting a theory about how Randall, in his deepest fantasies, imagine that they're engaging in a catfight for his nerd love and then agree to have a threesome. Good thing I'm not Rob, so I won't do that. Marvelous, eh?

@Anon339: The difference between XKCD and XKCDsucks is that we have since the beginning acknowledged how dreadful we are. We still do. In large letters. See that big bit at the top? Nono, beneath the title. Weeeeell, the title, too, I mean.... "XKCDsucks"? Totally the cutting edge of slicing journalism right there. But below that -- see that? No? Well, anyways, good luck in life, sir, I do believe you can receive government assistance for functional illiteracy. Pity it's not just REGULAR illiteracy like darn old Raven done got, 'cause den you get gov'ment cheques!

xkcdsucks never made a claim to being dreadful - it wore its colours on its sleeves to mercilessly rip into xkcd, certainly. But it used to be smarter, and it used to be better-argued.

The horrible, present-day-xkcdsucks seems to have inexplicably developed a culture of drooling, dogmatic idiocy rather than focussed, insightful vitriol and bitterness (oh, snap, he CAN read after all!).

The result is that xkcdsucks is currently a bigger disappointment trading off of its past glory than xkcd itself. Quite a feat.

The point is that xkcd was once worth that treatment. Bad as it was, it was worth dissecting. Now look at it- non-jokes, rehashes of older xkcd strips (except less funny) and lactation. It's gone so far off the deep end into bad it's almost bewildering. xkcd started out decently enough and was pretty good for almost 300 strips but has since then been in continuous decline. It might as well be in free-fall by now.

Randall needs to stop it with the biology jokes. He's a (wannabe) physicist, and he has no clue about biology or the culture of biologists.

He gets the situation completely backwards in this comic. Ornithologists have no interest in broadening their field to include "dinosaurs", let alone other reptiles. Why should they? Birds are a perfectly fine monophyletic group.

The strictest cladists out there (e.g., Gauthier, de Quieroz) study reptiles. They get worked up if you try to talk about reptiles as a group that doesn't include birds.

Nobody is trying to defend the field of herpetology (amphibians+reptiles) as having any evolutionary justification. It makes sense in a practical way though. You find both kinds of herps by flipping logs and rocks. Finding birds means pointing binoculars at the tops of trees.

Irregardless of any herpetological hostility to paraphyly, herpetologists still have joint meetings with icthyologists. Even more paraphyly there, but it could probably still be justified on practical grounds.

The reason the blog was so focused to begin with was because Carl, love him or hate him, was able to keep writing critiques 3 times a week. There's a link to a good post about why he stopped at the top of the page. But I'll leave you a link anyways.

It's just like the story of the grasshopper and the octopus. All year long the grasshopper kept burying acorns for winter while the octopus mooched off his girlfriend and watched TV. Then the winter came, and the grasshopper died, and the octopus ate all his acorns and also he got a racecar.

@Rinnon: Yeah, been following all that and reading webcomics.me too. Shame he's lost the drive to blog, but in that situation quitting's all you can do.

Rob's shown us the "other way" you can go. Just after Carl left he was still pretty good, but now he's letting standards slip and encouraging an atmosphere of monkeys hurling shit in a zoo.

It's his perogative, of course, but it's a shame to see what was a good blog go that way - particularly as it's all about mocking someone else's fall from grace. I'll try not to let the door hit me on the way out :)

Once upon a time there was a dishonest fox and a vain crow. One day the crow was sitting in his tree, holding a piece of cheese in his mouth. He noticed that he was holding the piece of cheese. He became hungry, and swallowed the cheese. The fox walked over to the crow. The end.

While obscure, Randall has got himself a perfectly legitimate grammatical construction there. There's an invisible "for" involved, which linguists call the "wtf English I am tired of you fucking with conjunctions" for.

@Samantha: I did not once question the legitimacy of his machination. But legitimate or not, people do not talk like this unless they're under some sort of situational duress... hence "bizarre Randall-syntax".

To all the haters: This blog has become a parody of XKCD, in that "awful" is the new standard. Don't like it? Why don't you try making a mirror blog and see how long you last before you pull an XKCD-explained.

Yeah, I can't say I completely disagree with you. But it's too bad. Can't blame Carl for quitting, it was probably the right thing to do for him. Can't really blame Rob for getting bored unless you think you could have lasted longer (I know I couldn't). Only person I blame is Randall for somehow managing to continue to write pure drivel for as long as he has. If his plan was simply to outlast his critics, he's winning.

I bet $5 that after Randall found out that Herpetology was a real thing (herp derp lol) he did 5 minutes of Wikipedia research then spent a further 5 minutes creating the comic then went back to counting his money.

I link to my own stuff in my name. What the hell else are you expecting in a link embedded in my name? ....Granted I did it twice [the exact frequency in which I mentioned "ravenzomg"], but don't hate bookends, my friend.

...why would a herpetologist care that someone wants to relabel the biology specialties? His education and research would be just as valid as before. If his focus was on amphibians, he'd be a batrachologist. If reptiles he's be an ornithologist with a subspecialty. New business cards would be the biggest issue.

Also unless there's an actual ornithologist movement to merge the fields, there isn't a joke. It's just "lulz, what if someone insisted everyone with a related field change their job title? If that's happening, it's funny!"

tl;dr comic is stupid randall is stupid people who think xkcd is funny are stupid.

Anybody here ever watch Angry Video Game Nerd? He's another Randall story. He used to be funny (2 or 3 years ago), and now his stuff is horrible. I mean fucking bad. He fails hard to be funny. But all his fans continue to suck his dick.

What the hell is this?

Welcome. This is a website called XKCD SUCKS which is about the webcomic xkcd and why we think it sucks. My name is Carl and I used to write about it all the time, then I stopped because I went insane, and now other people write about it all the time. I forget their names. The posts still seem to be coming regularly, but many of the structural elements - like all the stuff in this lefthand pane - are a bit outdated. What can I say? Insane, etc.

I started this site because it had been clear to me for a while that xkcd is no longer a great webcomic (though it once was). Alas, many of its fans are too caught up in the faux-nerd culture that xkcd is a part of, and can't bring themselves to admit that the comic, at this point, is terrible. While I still like a new comic on occasion, I feel that more and more of them need the Iron Finger of Mockery knowingly pointed at them. This used to be called "XKCD: Overrated", but then it fell from just being overrated to being just horrible. Thus, xkcd sucks.

Here is a comic about me that Ann made. It is my favorite thing in the world.

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